(Editor's note: Today marks the 45th
anniversary of the release of "The Sound of Music." This commentary, originally
posted July 6, 2005, details the impact the theme of the movie — freedom — had
on Lawrence W. Reed, president emeritus of the Mackinac Center and current
president of the Foundation
for Economic Education.)

This year, the nation of Austria celebrates the 60th
anniversary of its liberation from Nazi occupation. With the Allied victory in
May 1945, the German "Anschluss"
that had dragooned Austrians into Hitler’s socialist Third Reich in 1938 passed
into history, remembered only as a testament to the evil that springs from
megalomania and unlimited political power.

Austrians are marking a lesser
anniversary this year as well, but one that has deep personal significance for
me. Forty years ago, one of the most popular movies of all time was released: "The
Sound of Music," directed by Robert Wise.

The movie quickly became the box
office king of 1965. An American movie aimed primarily at an American audience,
it loosely
told the story of the
von Trapps of Austria and how the family escaped Hitler’s grasp. The beauty
of the Alpine mountains and the village of
Salzburg spurred a pilgrimage of American tourists to Austria that continues
to this day. Todd S. Purdum of the New York Times refers to the film as "the
last picture show of its kind, a triumph of craftsmanship and the apogee of the
studio system that produced the kind of entertainment that dominated
mid-20th-century mass culture."

In the summer of 1965, my mother announced one day that she
was taking me to a theater in Pittsburgh, 40 miles from our home, to see a film
called "The Sound of Music." I knew nothing of it other than that a lot of
singing was involved, and to my mind, that was a good enough reason to stay
home. I went reluctantly — and was enthralled. The music and the scenery were
memorable, but it was the plot and message that changed my life.

I came from a nonpolitical, working-class family. My father
quietly voted Republican, and my mother didn’t vote at all. When Dad wanted to
take my sister and me on a week’s winter vacation to Florida in 1963 and our
public school principal objected, Dad let him know in exceptionally colorful
terms that we were his kids, not the government’s, and we were headed
south come hell or high water. Perhaps that incident planted a seed of
anti-authoritarianism in me that sprouted in a darkened theater two years later.

"The Sound of Music" was a rude awakening. This wasn’t a
school telling me that I couldn’t take a vacation. This was a foreign regime
absorbing a peaceful, neighboring country and a father facing orders to abandon
his family to serve in the military of that very regime he hated. Something
sparked inside me, and it has stayed lit ever since. I wanted to know more about
the history of that period, and I began reading everything I could get my hands
on, including William L. Shirer’s classic "The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." Stories of people yearning for freedom
and going to great lengths to secure it captivated me. Socialism, communism,
fascism and all the collectivist "isms" became anathema. They reduced to A
pushing B around because A thinks he’s got a good idea.

Then came the "Prague
Spring" of early 1968. It wasn’t Austria, but it was right next door. The
news of the stirrings of liberty in communist Czechoslovakia dominated the
newspapers and television. I cheered as the Czechs boldly rattled their Soviet
cage. When Moscow crushed Czech liberties with troops and tanks, I was outraged
and eager to say so. Within days, a blurb in the local newspaper mentioned that
an organization called
Young Americans for Freedom would be holding a rally in Mellon Square in
downtown Pittsburgh to protest the invasion. I bought my first bus ticket. We
burned a Soviet flag and carried placards reading, "Liberate Czechoslovakia!"

Ideas rule the world. Tyranny rests on bad ideas; freedom
depends on good ones, such as personal responsibility and limited government.

Freedom is never automatic. You have to work at it, endure
setbacks and assaults, and resist the temptation to let somebody else fight freedom's battles for you.

Government unchecked is freedom’s greatest enemy. Expecting
too much from government and too little from ourselves is the surest path to
tyranny, even though the government’s promises of welfare and security may sound
attractive.

Those ideas, and many of their corollaries, led me to
pursue an economics degree at a place that teaches the values of liberty:
Grove City College, in Pennsylvania. From there, I went on to be a teacher
myself, first at
Northwood University and then as president of the Mackinac
Center for Public Policy. Liberty has been a common theme of my political
thought through all those years.

If my mother had not insisted on making the trek to
Pittsburgh to see "The Sound of Music," maybe I would have become a promoter of
freedom by some other route. But in hindsight, I have my doubts. It seems
more likely that I’d be a photographer or a veterinarian today. Those are
respectable and fulfilling professions to be sure, but they’re not what I
chose.

So I owe much of my last 40 years to a couple of hours in front of the big screen. Some say "The Sound of Music" was corny, but for me it was an epiphany. It’s my favorite film, and it always will be.

#####

Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for
Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland,
Mich. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that
the author and the Center are properly cited.